TERMINATING THE BOUND The very first requirement of our playing procedure is to to determine the point at which a bound will be terminated. There is no need for us to stop the game other than to use our rules to work out the results of a morale test or to introduce new movements brought about by the issue of orders during the course of the game. In order that we might calculate when an ordered movement becomes visible to the other side's commander, it is necessary that we stop the game a bit earlier than the occurrence of the event so that we can find out when it occurred by calculating the time taken to issue the order and have it transmitted. Thus, at any point during the unfolding course of events at which a player whishes to issue orders we must stop the game so that we can (a) determine how long this took, and (b) permit him only to issue orders relevant to what he has seen up to that point. Once a player has started his part of the dialogue which precedes the movement of figures, his opponent can stop him at any time to issue orders. What must be avoided, therefore, is players being allowed to 'backtrack' their orders - so that, for example, having been told that they will see a body of troops moving in a given direction and then veering off to move in another, they cannot say 'Oh well, when I first saw your troops, I would send mine to intercept their march to the side' but 7 must be permitted to issue orders countering a part of the movement only after that part would have become visible. Terminating a bound in order to test morale is perfectly straightforward. Since all rules give (in effect) some distance from other troops at which a morale test must be taken, all that we need do is progress our movements until our troops come within such a distance of the enemy and then halt the game until we have worked out the result of the morale test. Where the other side is moving towards our troops at the same time as ours are moving on them, all that we need do is calculate the point at which their movements would 'collide', and from that the distance at which they would test morale, and then terminate the bound. There is one morale point which we must 'redefine' for use with the new variable-length bound system (VLB). That is the morale point reached as a result of loss of personnel. Under the standard-length bound system, it is common to take more than one morale test during a firefight in order to determine the point at which one side or the other breaks. With VLB, casualty effects are more realistic and we would have to take several morale tests before we reached the one at which one side broke. Under the current system the end of the bound is determined for us in advance by the rulemaker therefore we may find the critical morale test in the same way as we find critical points on a line of advance by 'moving towards it' in a series of short time periods. What we cannot do is find it in advance. This, however, is just what we have to have when using VL bounds, since it is the occurrence of the morale test which will terminate the bound. Since what we are looking for is the point at which the troops will break, all that we need do is define the 'breaking points' for the troop types we employ and then, by comparing the length of time which it would take for the opposing forces to reach their respective breaking points, determine which would break first, and, therefore, the termination point of the bound. Thus, if we say that conscripts will break after sustaining losses of 40%, and that veterans would break after sustaining losses of 60%, and both are killing one another at the same rate, then the bound will terminate when the conscripts have lost 40% of their strength if that is less than 60% of the veteran's strength, (which it might not be if there are more conscript units than veteran units involved). DETERMINING THE LENGTH OF THE BOUND In reality, we would determine the duration of any piece of activity by reference to the clock, We cannot, of course, employ such a device in the wargame, and must, therefore, employ some other means of calculating the length of any particular bound. This is not difficult and requires no inordinate mathematical skill. Under the present system, all movements are quoted in terms of the 'rate per bound', whatever the length of the bound involved. With VLB we do not know the length of the bound, we do know, however, is that each bound will consist of a number of minutes - therefore, all that we have to do is quote our movement rates in terms of the ,rate per minute' in order to determine how long it took to cover any amount of distance. Thus, troops marching at 60 yards per minute who have covered 960 scale yards before the bound has been terminated because they must test their morale, will have taken 960/60 = 16 minutes to reach that point. Since it is the first critical event to arise that will terminate the bound, and since it is only the extent of the troops involved in that situation's movement that we can determine without reference to the duration of the bound, (others taking longer to reach critical points), we must employ a variation of the present system in order to bring other movements 'up to date' at the end of the bound. Thus, having, as in the previous example, discovered that this particular bound is 16 minutes long, we need only apply this time to the movement rates of other troops in order to bring them into synchronisation with the end of the bound. (So that, for example, cavalry moving at 100 yards per minute would move for 1600 yards, infantry moving at 80 yards a minute would be moved for a distance of 1280 scale yards). Where the length of the bound was determined by the time taken to issue orders, we need only apply the same principle to our movements. Thus, if it takes 10 minutes for a player to write and have transmitted an order to a body of troops, then all that we need do is bring our action forward by 10 minutes to bring it to the point at which the troops have received the order. When bounds are terminated as a result of fire effect alone, that is by a body of troops reaching its breaking point, we simply employ a variation of the same procedure. We simply divide the number of casualties that the troops will accept before breaking by the rate per minute of casualties they are sustaining. By this simple and straight forward calculation we not only determine the length of the bound, but also who won and who lost the fire-fight where opposing troops are blazing away at one another, and the number of men lost by both sides during the period of the engagement (this being achieved in a mere couple of minutes whether the fire-fight lasts for 10 minutes or an hour!). Where only one side is firing, such as when one force is sustaining an artillery bombardment from another over a period of time, we employ the same system, only this time there is no need to 'compare' the results of the two sides in order to find out which would break first. By simply dividing the number of men that the receiving force will take as casualties before breaking by the guns rate per minute of casualty infliction, we may determine the length of the bound. Thus, a brigade of 2400 infantry, who are losing 10 men per minute to enemy artillery fire, (not bad shooting if the infantry are in line and the guns some distance off), will last for 2 hours if their breaking point is 50%, (ie 1200110 = 120 mins), or 1 hour and 36 minutes if their breaking point is 60% (40% casualties) and only 48 minutes if fheir breaking point was 80% (militia or raw levies). The calculation needed to determine the outcome of these lengthy periods of game time only occupy a couple of minutes of the player's own time. ORDERS As the reader will appreciate, owing to its permitting hours of game time to be gone through in an average wargames session, the VL bound system will permit him to employ forces far larger than he is probably used to being able to field within the restrictions imposed by current rule forms. Since divisional tactical battles will be able to be dealt with in very few minutes of player time (even though they will be more accurately dealt with than is currently the case) the player who is used to commanding 'armies' of only divisional strength will find himself with the outcome of his engagement in a few minutes. The VLB system, therefore, is emminently suitable for use with armies of several corps in strength (the writer and his colleagues now consider corps versus corps actions to be mere 'skirmishes' in terms of game content). The facility to field, command, and employ large forces realistically provided by the system brings an added dimension to the game. Battles are fought on two levels, the grand tactical and the tactical, which are defined by David Chandler in his epic 'Campaigns of Napoleon' as: 'Grand Tactics in the Napoleonic era comprised the science and art of handling men, horses and guns during the crucial moves when close contact had been established with the enemy. It was not concerned with the confused and shifting techniques of actual hand-to- hand fighting, for these belong to the realm of tactics.' Because the two levels operate differently, the orders that are issued within their spheres of operation are different. Senior generals, who operate at grand tactical level, are concerned with the movement of the parts of their corps or armies in order to bring them to bear on those of the opposing commander in the most advantageous manner. It is their orders which tell their subordinate commanders what to do but not how to do it. They, in other words, administer the battle, whilst their subordinates fight it. As a result of this, grand tactical orders are generally broader in content than tactical orders, giving the recipient more information about the situation surrounding him than he would receive from a tactical order. Thus, a corps commander would not only tell a divisional commander to attack an enemy position, he would also probably inform him of the supporting actions of troops on his flanks or who would march with him, and of the actions he was to take when he had succeeded in his immediate task. Grand Tactical orders (defined as any order to a general officer during the Napoleonic period, since it was only brigade commanders whose orders actually set troops in motion) would take some time to produce - even a corps attack in the relatively close-packed Napoleonic era would require some three or four divisional orders for infantry, a divisional order for cavalry, and an order to the commander of the corps' artillery so that everything was properly prepared. Thus, so that commanders could not know 'in advance' what was going to happen on the battlefield, whenever a player wishes to issue grand tactical orders we must terminate the bound at that point so that he may only have available such information concerning the battlefield position that he would have observed. To determine the length of the following bound, therefore, all that we need do is time the player producing the orders, add that time to the time required to transmit them and have them acted on, and then progress the game by that over-all period. A player who is taken by surprise by a movement of the enemy and wishes to try and counter it, might take 5 minutes further on by the time his troops started to obey his order, by which time their action might no longer be valid. Tactical orders issued during the periods when troops are in very close contact, and, therefore, when there is no time to waste, are far less detailed than grand tactical orders - generally being of the 'take your battalion over there and stop that lot,' variety. Since such orders can be issued in very short time, it is unnecessary for us to terminate the bound during tactical engagements so as to 'time' players, and we may simply attribute a standard time, such as one or two minutes, to the issuing of such orders. Where a player's tactical orders become somewhat 'long-winded', of course, there is no reason for his opponent not timeing him to dissuade him from this. How tactical orders can be dealt with without terminating the bound will be covered when we come to look at how tactical engagements are dealt with under the rule mechanics. TIME DISLOCATION One of the major facilities afforded by the VariableLength Bound system is that of being able to 'dislocate' parts of the battlefield from one another, later returning them to time synchronisation to keep the battlefield's various parts in proper relation to one another. This facility is equally applicable whatever the period played, but is easier to understand at first if we consider it within the context of the earlier periods of military history. Because the range of the weapons was limited in comparison to what is available nowadays, and because the time taken to react to events was far slower than is the case with modern armies equipped with radio communications, it was perfectly in order to find forces fighting almost alongside one another who were unaffected and uninterested in the struggles on either side of them. A classic example of this is d'Erlon's attack at Waterloo, when four infantry divisions advanced against Wellington's left. The left-handed French division attacking La Haye Sainte, and the right-hand division, engaged at Papelotte, continued to combat the forces engaged with them even though the central divisions, operating closely together, were thrown back by the Allied troops. It is a simple fact of military life that battles, once one gets down to the tactical level, become very personal affairs, and the individual, or group, concentrates its attention virtually exclusively on that part of the hostile force with which it is engaged. Tactical actions take some time to fight, and using his knowledge of his period, the player should be able to judge what an 'average' time might be. For example, during the Napoleonic period once troops moved into tactical range of one another (some 200 yards) and became embroiled in a fire-fight, one can easily say that they would be so engaged for at least 20 minutes. Equally, owing to the problems mentioned in the paragraph above it was highly unlikely that formations on the flanks of those engaged would be able to contribute much to an engagement unless they were within a very short distance of it. We may thus dislocate parts of our grand tactical movements in order to bring them to the tactical engagement point. This facility permits us to fight several tactical engagements simultaneously in the game even though they are, in effect, taking place at somewhat different times. As an example of this we may return to d'Erlon's attack at Waterloo, where, owing to its having the shortest distance to cover, the left-hand French division would reach its tactical target before the others, and where, owing to the distance separating them from the other three divisions, the troops of the right-hand French division would be too far from the others to bother about what happened to them. In terms of the normal game procedure, we would bring the left-hand division into close-quarters and then hold everything up while we dealt with the detailed fighting in very short bounds. However, since we could easily judge that (a) an unsuccessful attack against the farmhouse would occupy more time than it would take for the central divisions to reach Picton's troops and, (b) that a successful attack would not halt the advance of the central divisions either, there is nothing to stop us 'dislocating' the movement of the two central divisions and bringing them 'forward in time' so that we may determine the outcome of their engagement simultaneously with that of the left-hand divisions. Equally, since nothing that happened on the left or centre of the corps would affect the movement of the right-hand division, there is no reason why we cannot 'dislocate' its movement and bring it forward to the point at which it reaches Papelotte. If, for the sake of example, we assume that the left-hand division would reach La Haye Sainte at 1:15, the central divisions come up against Picton at 1:30, and the righthand divisions come up at 1:45, we can see that the use of the 'dislocating' procedure would mean that our three attacks, (the central divisions being so close as to require them to be united in time), would be covering a period half an hour apart even though the players commanding them, and their opponents, would be fighting them out at the same time. All that we need do to revert to 'overall time synchronisation' is, after we have determined the outcome and duration of the separate tactical engagements, bring their results back to the same point in time. Thus, assuming that the fight at La Haye Sainte would last 45 minutes, the central divisions would be sent packing by the Scots Greys after 20 minutes, and that the right-hand division captured Papelotte after an hour, our tactical engagements would end at 2 pm (La HaVe St), 1:50 (Picton) and 2:45 (Papelotte) so that we could either take the game back, (or 'forwards in time), to 2:45 or later, depending on the situation. TACTICAL ENGAGEMENTS The very first thing that we must remember about tactical engagements is that the officers commanding the troops involved in them are acting under orders and are not free to change those orders. Thus, if a brigade commander has been ordered to attack a farmhouse, and ,sees' (as a player), that there is a strong enemy attack being launched against the other flank of his army, he will not start sending battalions over to the other flank to 'help out'. His presumption (as with any commander) will be that his superior will attend to that. Thus our tactical engagement procedures must take into account that the commander of the force will move into the situation with orders to do something, and that his orders will be restricted to achieving his task. If, after we have advanced our grand tactical movements as outlined in the previous section, there is no need for the issue of tactical orders such as when our forces start out in their attack formation and are 'going straight in'. We may simply carry their movement forward to the point at which they first take a morale test. However, if our force has moved forward in one formation and wishes to change its formation prior to the attack (such as when Napoleonic infantry advance in unit columns or in brigade/divisional columns and wish to deploy into line or when tanks make a sortie through a minefield and then have to fan out) the player may halt his force at any point along their line of advance and determine from the rules how long it will take for it to deploy. At either of the points above our troops will come under our tactical engagement rules. These do not differ in essence from our grand tactical rules, in that our ordered movements and actions are progressed to the point at which we must employ the rules to determine their outcome, the time taken to reach that point being the length of the bound. The only difference is that, as tactical engagements will be fought within short distances of the enemy, and since this will generally limit the ability of the commanders to control their troops once they have committed them, we require opposing players to draft a quick sketch of the actions which their tactical orders will produce. Once these sketches have been produced they will form the basis of the game's progress through the tactical engagement. Those movements which have been ordered which will first result in a morale test being taken are progressed to the point at which this will occur, other movements being progressed by the duration of the 'mini- bound' so determined. If the morale test is indecisive, and both sides end up facing one another, (a common occurence with frontal attacks), and shooting it out, the next of the ordered movements which will result in a morale test is progressed to the point at which that happens and the tests taken. If this second test is decisive, and one side breaks off the engagement, the effect of any firing that thas been going on is calculated up to that point. If the test is indecisive, then the next part of the sketch is progressed, (if there is one), in the same way. If, after all ordered movements have been progressed, there is no morale decision and the entire engagement has become one fire-fight, we would simply employ the procedure previously given for determining the duration and outcome of that fire-fight. As an example of how this tactical engagement system works in practice let us assume a brigade attack by infantry against an enemy brigade to see how the procedure would be employed to resolve the engagement in only a few minutes of player time. We will assume that the defending brigade is in line and that the attacking brigade is launching a frontal attack with two battalions, using a third to make a flank attack in support, and retaining a fourth in reserve to assist as required. Once the opposing players have produced their sketches, (not strictly necessary in the defender's case here if he is not 'issuing any orders') we would see that the frontal ly-attacking battalions would come within morale-test distance of the enemy before that moving round their flank. We would carry the frontal attack forward to that distance, determining the time that it took the battalions to reach that point and bring the flanking battalion forward by that time, and then take the morale tests. Having tested the morale of the units attacking from the front, and, say, found that they have started shooting at their opponents, we would then progress the flanking battalion until it reached morale test distance of the enemy. Having taken the morale test at that point, we would then, if the enemy had broken, determine the results of the fire-fight to that point by calculating the rate per minute of both sides multiplied by the number of minutes that it took the flanking battalion to reach morale test distance after the fire-fight had started. If the flanking attack wasn't decisive, and the battalion involved ended up by adding to the fire-fight that existed, we would still calculate the effects of fire to that point (since the numbers firing before and after that point would be different), and would then, if other units were ordered into the fight that might cause morale tests, simply work out the duration of the whole fire-fight between all the troops engaged. The general principle of the variable-length bound system, that we locate the end of the bound before doing anything else, and then 'catch up' the various pieces of action that have been going on during it, can be seen to operate at the tactical level in the same way as it is operated at the grand tactical. By this procedure ' bounds at tactical level may range from less than a minute to several minutes where the movements of the troops causes morale tests to follow hard on one another's heels, but, if a 'stalemate' situation is reached, we have the means to determine its outcome rapidly. Thus, none of the tactical detail is lost, although much of the present unrealistic irrelevancy is removed. THE NEW DIMENSION The ability to accurately and authentically reproduce the passage of time in our games gives us, as the reader will not have been slow to appreciate, an entirely new dimension in our hobby. Not only do we permit our games to take 'the right time' to reach a conclusion, thus increasing their reality in that respect, but, since time effects all that is done on the battlefield we bring reality into all aspects of our games. It has long been the wargamer's defence of his hobby that what he is doing is reproducing the reality of warfare, as opposed to the games played by children, which only reproduce, the semblance of warfare. That argument has, it is contended not been true to date, owing to the playing procedure in use, but is now possible of achievement with the introduction of the VILB system. Since we can relate time and activity to one another in their proper contexts, and are able, therefore, to deal with the activities of the smaller parts of armies in very little of our own time, we are able to employ forces of far larger size than has been the case within the realm of reality. Thus, when it only takes five minutes of the player's time to determine realistically, and with no loss of authentic detail, the outcome of a Napoleonic divisional attack, he may spend the few hours that he currently spends in wargaming on determining the outcomes of many divisional engagements, which will permit him to employ corps and armies in his games. The writer and his colleagues normally employ armies of several corps per side. In doing so they find no problems, and , indeed, that the mechanics of their games have become far simpler than they were before - although the authenticity of their games has become greater. They have found, in fact, that, while the demands made on them by the mechanism of the game has decreased, the demands made on them by the quality of their games has increased since greater reality content has brought with it a greater requirement in terms of 'generalship competence' in order to achieve success. It has always been the writer's contention that, at the end of a wargame, the players should be able to say that 'had they had those men, those guns and that equipment, and had conducted their battle in that manner, then that is the outcome they would have achieved.' It is only with the introduction of the VLB concept and the other concepts introduced in this article that he has felt that statement to be true of his own wargames. The VILB concept, dealing as it does with the authentic reproduction of the passage of time, is not unique to any one period of history. just as time itself is universal, a minute being a minute whether it is passing in 4000BC or 4000AD, the accuracy and authenticity of the variablelength bound concept may be applied by wargamers regardless of the period in which they play their games. It is for this reason that this series of articles have dealt in general terms with the accuracy that the concept brings to the player's game, and with the effects that it has on his rules, rather than dealing in greater detail with its application in the writer's own favorite period. The VL bound concept, by permitting the wargamer to realistically employ great armies, brings him closer to the boardgamer who, in seeking to obtain the 'feel' of high command, has had to forgo the detail of battle which so affects its outcome. The writer and his colleagues, indeed, have found that so necessary is it to employ 'real' armies in order to fully make use of the facilities afforded by the system, that they have had to move on from the larger figure sizes to the 1/300 scale so that they could afford to produce the sort of forces they can now involve in their wargames sessions. A movement in the direction of smaller figures which owes nothing, I hasten to add, to their all being Scots. Indeed, as they progressed through the months of turning the concept into reality, they came to realise that it formed, together with the use of the 1/300 scale figure, the 'missing link' between figure and board gamers, and that many of the mechanics of each form of wargaming could be employed in the 'new dimension'. Thus, the writer's rules employ 'built-up areas' rather than single buildings, using similar, although slightly more detailed rules for fighting for them as are employed by board games. This writer, along with countless other wargamers in the history of the hobby, has long laboured with the problem of time in the game. That the answer to that problem has now been found is of incontestable value to all wargamers. The credit for this, and the thanks of all wargamers, belong to Dr. Paddy Griffith, lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy in England, from whom the writer first received the suggestion that activity rather than time should dictate our games, and whose continual assistance and willingness to reply to a veritable stream of correspondence on the subject, played such a vital part in permitting the writer to translate the concept from a brilliant theory into a practical system. The thanks of the writer are also due to Derek Sharkey and David Burnett of The Capital Wargames Club in Edinburgh, for their great help in bringing the concept to practicality. The concept was first publicly presented at the annual conference of 'Wargames Developments', a body of wargamers who came together to combine their talents and to try and move the hobby along the road to achieving its stated purpose of 'realistically representing warfare in game form', where it was immediately successful and widely accepted. More New Concepts New Concepts in Wargaming 1: The Time Scale New Concepts in Wargaming 2: Game Mechanics New Concepts in Wargaming 3: The Moral Battle Back to Table of Contents -- Courier Vol. III #4 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1981 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com